Science at UM [S04-ep03]: The race for rare metals

[Podcast] - Published on October 3, 2024 in Science-Society

This week in Science at UM Roberto Interdonato, researcher at the Tetis laboratory Tetislaboratory, talks to us about mining transactions. The report takes us to the nuclear magnetic resonance platform with Aurélien Lebrun. Then Thomas Pichery, sustainable development communications officer at UM, talks to us about the Science Festival. A program broadcast every Wednesday at 6 p.m. on Divergence FM-93.9.

And today we're talking about cognitive dissonance. Dissonance between an image of ourselves in the future, clean and green, where our electric cars and bikes don't pollute, where our homes are heated by renewable energies that are good for nature, and where we can continue to consume the products of our industries without guilt because they have a carbon footprint close to zero.

Opposite this image is another, older and uglier one, that of our societies fed by dirty, toxic black fossil fuels, embodied by the coal mine in Germinal or the gold mine and its rivers of arsenic. An outdated image, an image of the past.

And yet, the duty of realism requires us Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Australians, Russians, and Chinese to superimpose these two images in order to accept the idea that the energy transition has a cost, and that we are not the ones paying for it.

Because our batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines have one major flaw: they consume a lot of resources. Lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, and aluminum are their guilty pleasures. And according to the Net Zero Emissions by2050 (NZE) scenario, demand for minerals considered critical is expected to increase 1.5 to 7 times by 2030.

And when you say ore, you say... mine. You can picture the dirty, ugly, toxic image. That of the monopolization of arable land, of hunger, of irreversible ecological damage, of child labor, of war.

Using open data, Roberto Interdonato from the Tetis laboratory and his team mapped the current transnational mining network linking investor countries and target countries to highlight distributional injustices and the unequal distribution of the social and environmental costs of resource extraction.

He published an article in the journal World Development Perspectives entitled Mining Resources: The Uncomfortable Truth About the Energy Transition.

The report takes us once again to the Balard Chemistry Center on the nuclear magnetic resonance platform with Aurélien Lebrun, who explains how spectrometry can be used to better characterize molecules or determine the purity of samples.

Finally, our last-minute guest is Thomas Pichery, who is in charge of sustainable development communications at UM, and he will be presenting the Science Festival, which begins this weekend.

At UM Science, you have the program, so let's get started!

Co-production: Divergence FM / University of Montpellier
Host: Lucie Lecherbonnier
Interview: Aline Périault / Lucie Lecherbonnier
Reporting and editing: Lucie Lecherbonnier / Aline Périault
Production: Tom Chevalier

Listen to the program “A l’UM la science” on Divergence FM 93.9

Keywords: Science at UM, Research, Science, Company